Bulkhead has removed Lonestar's Season 2 cash and XP bonus and slowed Driver levelling, a day after Season 2 launched. In a short video posted by @WARDOGS on X on the evening of 15 October, the team admitted it had made two mistakes. It also said zone exploiters are getting 24-hour bans and that Limited Mode servers are coming in a mid-season update.
The post sums it up as "We're holding our hands up and we got a few things wrong." CEO Joe Brammer leads the video, according to PCGamesN. The same list went up in the official Discord's announcements channel at about 21:00 UTC, saying the Lonestar buff and the Driver exploit go "when servers next restart." No Steam post or written patch notes have followed yet. Bulkhead says a "proper write-up" and a longer video are coming.
What happened to the blue team bonus?
It is gone. For Season 2 the patch notes gave Lonestar, the blue team, a win bonus in cash and XP. The video gives the figures for the first time: 5% cash and 2.5% XP.
Bulkhead says the bonus was meant to run for about a week. Instead, the most competitive players moved to blue straight away, so Lonestar started winning by far the most games. That threw off team balance, and the team says it was affecting how quickly games filled and started.
The XP gain was small for most people. Bulkhead estimates 100 to 200 extra XP a match for a typical player and about 600 for top players earning around 25,000 XP a game. The team says players warned them about the bonus and it should have been removed sooner. It points to the new spawns on Bakurani as the actual fix for Lonestar's win rate. Why blue kept losing in Season 1 →
The video does not mention the other half of the experiment: 20% off at the vendor for any team at least 40 points behind second place. That applies to all three factions and nothing says it is going. The factions compared →
Why were players getting tanks so early?
Bulkhead says Driver XP was set wrong. Season 2 sped up levelling: reaching level 20 now takes 111,500 XP, down from 250,000 in Season 1. According to the video:
| Change | What Bulkhead says |
|---|---|
| Level gates | Season 1's level 9 is now level 10; Season 1's level 14 is now level 20 |
| Why level 20 | It is where "a role's identity picks up", and the change roughly doubles the number of players who reach it |
| Driver pick rate | About 10% of players last season, about 18% now |
| Logistics, Driver, Pilot | 40–50% faster up the curve than the other roles |
| Result | Players reached the top vehicle unlocks before others had launchers to fight them |
Bulkhead says its other roles are levelling at the pace it intended. The problem is that early tanks, including the L2A6 and the new, cheaper T-72, are showing up before anyone can counter them. How levelling works →
The fix: a temporary change is already live. Logistics streak bonuses now build back to Season 1 pacing. Bulkhead hopes to raise Driver XP again in the next hotfix once the exploit below is closed. It has not given a date for that hotfix.
Who is getting banned?
Players who repeatedly drove in and out of the zone to farm logistics XP are getting 24-hour temporary bans. Bulkhead puts the number at fewer than 1,000, against what Brammer described as about 310,000 people playing at the time. Bulkhead calls this "very clearly exploiting": it compares it to deploying 150 crates in a match when most people deploy 30.
Players on Discord report that the bans also reset XP to 0. Some on Steam say they got longer bans. We have not seen anything from Bulkhead about either. What gets you banned →
What are Limited Mode servers?
Servers with the top-tier gear capped, coming in Update 0.25 at the end of October or the start of November. They replace the current low-level servers. Level 4 armour, the heavy tank and artillery are switched off, so the match plays at the level 2 armour stage. Bulkhead says official servers will support the mode as well.
In the video the mode has a working name and Bulkhead says it needs renaming; the X post calls it Limited Mode Servers. Bulkhead says it aims to bring back the early-to-mid game that many players prefer to the endgame. Brammer admits the endgame is the weakest part of the game. The mode was held back from launch so Season 2's progression data would not be skewed. Find a server →
What has not changed?
- No reset or rollback was mentioned for players who unlocked tanks early, and no compensation either.
- No finer date for 0.25 than "end of October, start of November".
- The Eiffel 65 "Blue (Da Ba Dee)" music tape stays. Bulkhead calls it "the real blue buff". It is Lonestar-only, level 29, $25,000, per the patch notes.
We will update this post when Bulkhead's written notes land.